In North Texas, Princeton halts development to keep pace with population growth

Collin County has long been one of the fastest growing provinces across the country, not just Texas. Dallas suburbs like McKinney, Allen and Plano are fueling most of that growth. But the development frenzy has spread even beyond those borders.

For example, Princeton is about 10 miles east of McKinney. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 20,000 people have moved to Princeton since 2010, quadrupling its population.

City leaders announced a decision on Monday to temporarily pause all new residential development to help Princeton’s infrastructure catch up. The initial moratorium will last 120 days, but the city’s mayor, Brianna Chacón, expects it to last longer.

Chacón spoke to the Texas Standard about the development challenges her city faces.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity:

Texas Standard: Tell us about the challenges your city is facing because of all these new developments.

Brianna Chacon: It's kind of a multifaceted problem. The biggest problems are the overcrowded roads. Our public safety is under a lot of pressure, just because of the number of residents they have to serve. And then our infrastructure, so our water services.

I bet a lot of people move to that area to escape urbanization.

At first I think so. I think people are moving here now because a lot of people are excited about the growth.

But at the same time, well, now you're talking about sort of halting development. Tell us more about that decision and how city officials are thinking.

We just put a stop to our residential growth, not our commercial growth, we are still pro-development in that regard.

But we need to pause, take a breather to make sure that we have the infrastructure in place, that we have the public safety services in place, so that we can better serve all of our residents here as we feel the growing pains and the strains of growth.

How long are you going to stop this housing development?

So right now it's 120 days. That's a state directive, not a city directive. That gives us time to assess the situation and plan for the future. Then, if we need to apply for an extension, we will do that if necessary. But initially, it's 120 days.

So what are you going to do? I mean, because this is a relatively short window here.

Right. So again, 120 days doesn't solve all the problems. It just gives us enough time to analyze that problem and then create a better path forward. So we don't expect it to end after 120 days. But again, it gives us time to pause and build a lot better than what we were doing.

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I think a lot of people are now rethinking the idea that bigger is better, and the push for continued growth in a lot of Texas cities may need to be reconsidered.

Because you end up with a lot of back-end issues that you now have to clean up – they weren’t prepared; they didn’t have the infrastructure to handle all that push for growth. What do you think?

I totally agree. I think most of our cities in Collin County are feeling the exact same pressure. Nobody was prepared for the massive growth that we had. And it's too much. It's happening too fast and nobody was adequately prepared for it.

So what are you hearing from loyal citizens about the sudden growth of the community? Is it changing your city in a deeper way?

It's changed our city rapidly, you know, just in the amount of time that people have to spend on our roads. It's caused a big point of contention for a lot of people. We're still a commuter city. They have to go to work. So most of their day they're on Highway 380 instead of home with their families.

So in a way, the residents – people who have lived there for a long time – have to pay the price for all that growth, and now you hope to do something about it.

How long do you think it will be before things go back to normal, or is that even a possibility? Have things changed for good?

I think things have changed forever. We will never be that small town again. But that doesn't mean we can't do something better in the future.

You know, we have partnerships with TxDOT – and fortunately 380 is a TxDOT road – so as quickly as they can move, we work with them to help them do that.

But on the city side, we just passed our budget, we allocated $17 million to our roads that we will actually improve for our residents here.

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